Transatlanticism is Death Cab for Cutie’s saving grace. It is the band’s opus. It is their finest collection of songs, cover to cover, laden with melancholy melodies, unbridled emotion and some of the best lyrics that frontman Ben Gibbard ever wrote. Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of Transatlanticism’s release, and even now, the songs are as emotionally piercing and powerful as they were before.
Death Cab for Cutie comes with a stigma: emotional teenagers, the early high school years, all the feelings of puberty everyone was too young to understand. It was the band equivalent of slamming the bedroom door shut when a teenagers’ love wasn’t reciprocated, and they couldn’t tell if they were going to scream or cry.
Transatlanticism covers all of those events and their accompanying emotions, but it goes further. It was the album where Death Cab stopped being just teenage angst and brought smart instrumentation, effective song structure and an expanded scope of sound. Gibbard became a respected writer. The band didn’t just write simple-structured pop songs, it wrote songs that crescendoed when they needed to, receded when they didn’t and affected their audience because of it. Is there a song more subtly mind-blowing than “A Lack of Color”? Probably not.
Transatlanticism makes its audience think. The album’s opener, “The New Year,” triggers a revelatory introspection in its listeners. Gibbard is feeling down, and he takes his listeners with him. The album’s most recognized track, “Title and Registration,” uses elaborate imagery to connect to listeners. In “Tiny Vessels,” Gibbard sings of love for the wrong reasons in a beautifully orchestrated tune, constantly reiterating the most memorable line of the whole album, “You are beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me.”
In a way, listeners feel like they are growing up with Gibbard. The snippets of his personal life are universal. The primitive physicality of “We Looked Like Giants,” the desperation of “Expo ‘86” and the candor of “Passenger Seat” — everyone has been there before but has never heard someone describe it the way Gibbard does.
That’s what makes a good album great — its ability to communicate a message in a way never heard before, to make people think old thoughts in new ways. When listening to Transatlanticism, listeners feel every bit of what Gibbard feels. So critics can hate on the cheesiness of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” they can call Gibbard a whining teenager who will never grow up, but they can never touch Transatlanticism because it is and probably will always be Death Cab for Cutie’s finest moment
